Residents voice frustrations over recent flooding

1300 Houston homes flooded

Steve Hawley, May 18, 09.

About 40 people expressed their frustrations and shared stories of last month’s floods in front of a City Council committee meeting on Monday morning. Mayor Bill White called the special joint meeting of the Flooding & Drainage and Transportation, Infrastructure & Aviation committees in response to the flooding.

Mike Marcotte, director of the City of Houston Department of Public Works and Engineering, provided the council members and audience with a half-hour presentation detailing the city’s role in stormwater management. Marcotte noted that the city’s drainage system is designed to handle a two-year storm, or one to two inches of rain per hour. The city’s streets, he said, are now being designed for 100-year storms dumping four to five inches of rain per hour. The design is meant to keep water within the street right-of-way and prevent it from flooding adjacent homes and businesses.

Part of the problem last month, he said, was that the ground was already saturated from previous storms. Furthermore, Marcotte said that in some areas, such as Buffalo Bayou at Beltway 8, rainfall exceeded 100-year levels on the morning of April 28. About 2,200 homes in Harris County were flooded, of which about 1,300 were within the Houston city limits. Marcotte noted that only three other storms, all occurring since 1994, had damaged as many houses.

Marcotte said his department’s future priorities are determining overland flooding paths, protecting emergency access routes and critical facilities, assessing future development and redevelopment, and improving water quality and habitat.

After Marcotte’s presentation, residents voiced their concerns, complaints, and ideas for avoiding similar flooding in the future. Many said they had lived in their current houses for 40 or 50 years and had never experienced flooding until now. Others told of repeated flooding, including one woman who had been flooded four times in as many years and suffered $170,000 in damage on April 28. However, because her house is not technically in a floodplain, she is not eligible for government aid. Another woman carried her 8-month-old baby through eight inches of sewage inside the house and three feet of water outside.

“If you think five inches of rain is a 100-year event, you’d better go back…” said one man, eliciting cheers from the audience. Another asked if there were any cumulative rainfall standards instead of just hourly measurements.

Two residents said that their houses began flooding in the early 1970s, coinciding with the construction of the Memorial City Mall and adjacent areas. One of them noted that developers could pay a fee instead of creating water detention facilities, asking, “Why are people allowed to pay in lieu of [creating detention facilities]? Why are variances being permitted?”

Council member Pam Holm, who represents many of the hardest-hit areas in west Houston, agreed, saying, “Either the fee needs to be big enough to fix the problem, or there needs to be no fee,” meaning every large development would be responsible for on-site water detention.

Marcotte, at the urging of City Council, said that he would arrange public meetings in the affected areas to address specific causes of flooding.

Recently, other residents expressed concern that planned development along the Katy Prairie floodplain could cause more frequent or severe flooding.